6/8/12

Strategy Above the Depths

"I think there are certain crimes which the law
cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge."

- Sherlock Holmes ("The Adventure of Charles
Augustus Milverton")

I value the opinion of my fellow brethrens
exploring the detective story more than any other and hang onto their
recommendations, observations and conclusions like a pile of freshly mined,
rough diamonds – before giving them a sharp appraising look myself. That's why
you regularly see books emerge here that were mentioned or discuss elsewhere,
but even with a positive impression from a fellow devotee and a personal
self-control that only exists as a spark of perpetual enthusiasm you have no
signed guarantee that the opaque pieces of drift-glass will
actually yield a sparkling gem. But what to do when opinions differ?

The internet has not been kind in its appraisal
of Rufus King's The Case of the Constant God (1938), not as a detective
story anyway, noting that it was "unusual downbeat" and "moderately
amusing" but also "not quite fair play" and "not much fun to read,"
while Robert Adey deigned the book worthy of extra praise in Locked Room
Murders and Other Impossible crimes (1991) – saying that King appears here
as "a writer of the first rank" and expresses his surprise "that he
is so comparatively little known." Needless to say, this propelled the book
to the upper echelons of my Most Wanted list and I have to admit that having
identified the book as a locked room mystery helped in shelling out the bounty
for its capture. Besides, would a book with the title Locked Room Murders
tell a lie to me? (said he, with the conviction of a raving lunatic).

But enough of this palaver, let's get this show
on the road and that's where this unusual case begins for King's series
detective, Lieutenant Valcour, where a Mr. Blodgett witnesses a corpse being
driven around the city by two men. A routine check on the vehicle, combined
with the description of the suspects, identifies them as Artemus Todd and
Jonathan Alder, crumbs of the upper crust of the Long Island society, which
makes it also an unlikely story. After all, people like that are not in the
habit of picking up hitchhikers, let alone ones that need to be dropped off at
the morgue, and that's when King puts the plot in reverse and backs up into a
flashback.

We learn that the name of the stiff in the
backseat was Sigurd Repellen, a nasty blackmailer who dipped his pen in the
same venomous inkwell as Charles Augustus Milverton and James Chigwell, morally
responsible for the tragic suicide of Jenny Alder – Jonathan’s loving wife and
Todd's darling daughter. They accidentally killed him when they threw him
against a bust of Emperor Nero and slumped down to the floor. Justifiably
homicide? Morally, perhaps, but the family had made plans, conspired and that
gives a prosecutor an opening to argue that the outcome would’ve been the same.
Ergo, a murder charge. They decide to expunge the evidence, dump the body and
lay down until the trails grows cold, but, as we learned from the opening
chapter, it's a bust from almost the get go. The first half of the story can be summed
up as an inverted mystery, in which we follow both Valcour and the Alder-Todd household
as each is taking their measures against one another, but this was the least
interesting portion of the book.

The pace was picked up when Repellen's remains
were discovered and the medical examiner extracted not only a bullet from the blackguard's
heart but also a completely different story. As a final act in this drama we
see Alder and Todd taking flight to sea aboard their yacht, while Valcour soared
above them in a seaplane before coming down from the sky like a bird of prey.
This is my favorite part of the book and offers a nifty, fairly clued
impossible problem of a stowaway, whom Valcour believes to be the murderer, but
is not found when the boat was turned inside out. As a matter of fact, it was
this impossible disappearance from an ocean-bound yacht that saved me from
having to put this book away with a lingering sense of disappointment. Plot
wise, it was the only part that was done right. The murderer could've been a
nice surprise, which, admittedly, was a clever play on the least-likely-suspect
gambit, but not enough clues were stowawayed on its pages to pull it off in a
satisfactory manner.

All in all, The Case of the Constant God is a readable, offbeat crime novel, but not one that's particular memorable,
challenging or engaging.

This was
only my second Lieutenant Valcour book, the first being the unconventional Murder
by the Clock (1929), but from these I have gotten the impression that Rufus
King was sort of a poor man's Ellery Queen – which may explain his neglect. I know there are mystery fans who have an high opinion of King, but I don't see in those two titles.

A lot of readers really liked him in the 1930s. I agree with you that Murder by the Clock was not all that special, though I can see how it struck am novel note in its day. I think Murder by Latitude is much better. It's the books from about 1929-1934 that really made his name back then.

I remember King as a staple in EQMM in the Fifties and Sixties, and King's collection MALICE IN WONDERLAND is listed in Queen's Quorum. I have several of his books stashed away but have never read any of them.

The Usual Suspect

An Elementary Observation

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants.

Witnesses' Statements

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre)."The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).